Get on with having a family, if that's what you want, or you might not be able
to have them at all

It is a modern medical lament that keeps drifting in and out of earshot, like some melancholy refrain from a familiar song: we’re having babies too late, or accidentally leaving having babies so late that some of us won’t be able to have them at all.

Professor Dame Sally Davies, chief medical officer for England, said last week she was concerned about the “steady shift” for women to postpone having babies until their late thirties and early forties, and also that many more women are “choosing not to have children”. New figures show that 20 per cent of women now reach the age of 45 without having children, whether by accident or design.

This is, of course, largely a result of the fact that women can now choose to delay babies, which sometimes results in the removal of the choice to have them. After a certain point, Nature quietly removes her offer from the table, and only science can try to redeem it. It also reflects, of course, the difficulty many women have in finding a suitable, willing man with whom to have children.

Some women will be heartbroken by childlessness, gambling their savings and their sanity on the erratic dividends of IVF, while others will have happily decided against babies. In some ways, motherhood runs counter to everything we are otherwise now taught to value: freedom, independence, professional ambition, mobility, wealth and sleep. Giving birth is a headlong topple into domestic chaos, unpredictable expense and emotional tumult. Once we’re in the family whirlpool, few besotted parents would wish ourselves out, but from a coolly rational standpoint it is understandable why some women might hesitate or decline to jump.

Still, we all know the facts: that female fertility reduces after 35, and while successful pregnancies are certainly possible after that they become harder to guarantee. The truth is, we’re not just delaying babies, we’re delaying – or being forced by circumstances to delay – everything that was once seen as synonymous with adulthood.

My generation were late starters, and there is little to suggest that the trend is about to reverse. The average age at which a woman gives birth to a first child is now 28 (and 30 for a first marriage; in 1970, it was 22). When it comes to buying a home, the average age for a first-time buyer is 28-29 (with parental help; without it, the age rises to nearer 40).

My grandfather would have had no real conception of the notion of “a teenager”. Back then, in working-class families at least, you ricocheted from childhood into adulthood with very little to bridge the gap. He had a part-time job at eight, left school and started earning a wage at 14. He had to help support himself and his widowed mother; when marriage beckoned, in his twenties, it must have felt like a form of freedom.

Today, adolescence is annexing ever greater chunks of adulthood, claiming everyone from 15 to 30, and sometimes well beyond. The twenties are generally acknowledged to be spent by both sexes not in child rearing, but in developing a career and the pursuit of carefree living.

In fact, it is just as often a decade bubbling under with anxiety, spent struggling to pay off student debt, getting a tenuous foothold in careers that pay badly or demand “experience” in the form of unpaid internships, fumbling towards the steep property ladder, while keeping one nervous eye on the future for the magical point at which one might be, finally, ready to “start a family”. My perception is that those years have become more — not less — fraught since I stumbled through my twenties.

And yet I wonder whether, just as the economic climate has become harsher for young people, the expectations many place on becoming a parent are also too idealised. There is a feeling that everything has to be slotted in place: the steady job, the presentable home, the emotional maturity, before one can even have a crack at having a child.

I used to think a bit like that myself: since I felt barely able to master adult life – its bills, its unending bureaucracy, its dreary demands for forward planning – I wondered how I could dare to take a tilt at motherhood. After I had my first child, in my mid-thirties, I suddenly realised that (provided you are reasonably kind-hearted) you automatically attain a certain level of responsibility: there is no choice any more, only the compulsion of love.

And now I would be inclined to say to couples in their mid-twenties, provided they are sure about their relationship and have sufficient means to keep the wolf or Wonga from the door: get on with a family, if that’s what you want in the long run anyway. If only society would make it practically easier for younger parents, the idea of attaining absolute readiness for parenthood in your thirties is a myth. There is no magic moment – you grow up when you have to.

Russell milks his brand ruthlessly

Passion: Brand was a hit with one student in particular at Cambridge University last week (Chris Williamson/Cambridge U/REX)

It was an extraordinary scene at the Cambridge Union last week, where students appeared charmed to be called “a bunch of Harry Potter poofs” by the visiting Russell Brand (although one wonders what their reaction would have been had the words been uttered by, say, the choleric former Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom). A 20-year-old student, Theodora Taverner, interrupted his speech to hug him and declare her “passion” for him. She later pronounced: “It’s the spiritual side of him that makes me idolise him.”

There appears to be a kind of bizarre cult building up around Brand, greatly encouraged by Brand himself. Earlier this year he tweeted a picture of himself standing next to a giant, idealised mural of his own face adorned with his quotation: “We need a spiritual revolution: oneness, togetherness, tolerance, respect and love.”

Recently he has advocated political revolution as well, yet when pressed on details, the exercise grows akin to nailing mercury to a wall. It appears to consist of not voting until an undefined “truly representative system” emerges. We can all rest easy, though, that the revolution will be “sexy”.

I am finding Brand-as-guru tricky to reconcile with the Brand who left a squawking message on Andrew Sachs’s answerphone bragging that he had had sex with the elderly actor’s granddaughter, or the Brand who prank-called an emergency rape hotline as part of his stage act in 2008. Now, he declares himself a feminist opposed to Page Three.

Mr Brand is not stupid: he lives up to his name, and in the modern world brands have to change to prosper. I begin to think, however, that a few Cambridge students might need their heads examined.

Which bit of Britain do you mean?

'British identity': Alex Salmond (PA)

Alex Salmond’s position on Britishness is getting a little too complicated to understand. Last week he insisted that he sees himself as “British”, saying: “I have Scottish identity, British identity, I’ve multi-layers of identity.”

This is where it all gets a bit tricky. I know that geographically the term “the British Isles” also includes the whole of Ireland. “Great Britain”, by contrast, is the collective name for England, Scotland, Wales and their associated islands (it does not include any part of Ireland).

“The United Kingdom” refers to the political union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, from which Mr Salmond openly wishes to extract Scotland. Since the people of the Republic of Ireland assuredly do not see themselves as “British”, most people regard “Britishness” – meaning its emotional, cultural and historical content – as synonymous with the United Kingdom.

So is Mr Salmond’s “British identity” a narrowly geographical one as a resident of the British Isles (which would be unaltered by Scottish independence), or is it an attachment to the traditions and institutions of the United Kingdom? I think he should make clear what his “British identity” entails. Only then can we have an honest discussion about whether, why and how he proposes to keep any of it.